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The blog you’re reading right now will be our home. First, we’ll bring you into our world through in depth technical articles, ground breaking statistical analysis and tales of epic and annual nerf wars. Second, we’ll also be giving back to the community in the form of frequent open source contributions, so expect this space to be updated regularly with the latest from Enova Tech & Analytics. Lastly, because Enova is focused on helping others, we’ll keep this site updated with all of the latest meetups, workshops and conferences the Enova team is helping with.

API World 2018

The API World 2018 conference was held at Hilton Convention Center, conveniently located in downtown San Jose just minutes from San Jose Airport.

My intention in attending the conference was to find the use cases for APIs – how companies are:

Using APIs for internal use with microservices architecture

Exposing the data and capabilities as products and services

It was a three-day conference. The first day is exclusive to PRO pass holders and included talks related to Microservices. The second day included talks on API development, architecture, security, strategy, and management. Third-day conference has panel talks, hackathon and talks on how APIs are used in IoT and Blockchain technology.

I found the below talks very insightful as I learned some new API concepts, platforms and best practices which I was previously unaware of.

API Security beyond SSL and tokens

This talk highlighted various best practices such as data validation for both incoming and outgoing data, testing for XSS script and sql injection attacks etc to secure your APIs

CMS Blue button

CMS Blue button provides API that enables Medicare beneficiaries to allow their claims data to research program apps and services they trust

APIs powering Fintech

A talk by Yodlee explaining financial data aggregation and how various companies are offering services using financial data aggregators

Large data transfers through APIs

This talk shows how to process requests for downloading or uploading files > 1GB by using techniques such as rate limiting and tools like nginx and API server.

Service Mesh (panel talk)

What is service mesh – problems that it solves – how it differs from ESB – where it doesn’t fit – hard part in implementing service mesh

APIs 101: A Crash Course in API Strategy

This talk provided insights into marketing strategy in successfully launching an API service

Design based approach to microservices

This talk was about Introduction to Microservices. It also outlined the design principles for successful development and deployment of microservices.

Smartcar

Smartcar is a SaaS platform that provides API SDK that enables developers to develop apps for easy and secure communication with vehicles

Connect to any APIs

Jitterbit is a SaaS platform that lets you connect to any public APIs and start developing apps rapidly instead of creating APIs from scratch.

I found the conference was extremely useful as I got some insight into how companies are using APIs to solve business problems. Companies are building SaaS platforms by leveraging cloud capabilities. This would be an excellent venue to showcase Enova’s “decisions as a service” platform – Enova Decisions.

Below is the link to API World conference page. Check out to browse the agenda of the upcoming event to see if it interests you.